Scientific Illustration I: A guided tour

At Planet Tuna we love to bring art and science together. Take a quick tour on Scientific Illustration with illustrator Hannah Bonner, …

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Hi, my name’s Hannah and I’m one of the illustrators here at Planet Tuna, where we love to bring science and art together. Today I’m going to take you on a quick tour of the field of Scientific Illustration. I’ll tell you what it is, I’ll give you plenty of examples, and I’ll also tell you about the four main areas of science that use scientific illustration. And if you’re curious to know what it takes to become a scientific illustrator, there’s a second video you can watch where I talk about that. OK, ready? Let’s go! So what is a scientific illustration? It’s any accurate visual representation of a scientific subject. The illustrator translates science into images. Is this important? Well, imagine that this is your high school biology text and you have to learn about the digestive system. It’s a lot easier with this, isn’t it? The most basic form of science is observing the natural world around us. Illustrating it has a very long history, there’s this incredible bison from Altamira in Spain. It’s from many thousands of years ago, but it’s so well drawn that it’s identifiable as a particular species, Bison priscus, or Steppe bison. Amazing. Observing nature is how I got my start as an illustrator. When I was 19, my dad wrote a book about the plants of the Balearic, and I did the drawings. We’d go out and collect plants, bring them home, and I’d draw them in pen and ink. I’m also a consumer of natural science illustration. If I go swimming and I want to identify some fish that I’ve seen, then I pull out this wonderful guide of the fish of the Mediterranean. And the other day on a hike I saw this cool caterpillar and I found it here. So how come photography hasn’t replaced illustration? Well, because an illustrator can choose what to highlight as being most useful for identification, and can show all the species on the page in the same light and position, for example whereas a photo is a snapshot of one particular individual at one particular moment. And I’ll show you other areas where illustration is the only way to go. We also illustrate ecosystems. Here’s a lovely one of the soil ecosystem, which also would be difficult to photograph. There’s also geology. Here’s a drawing I did for a science dictionary. When I’m drawing for kids I use a simpler style, but I make sure to be just as accurate scientifically. And if you’re looking at rocks, you might be lucky enough to find a fossil, like these of some tiny plants that I found on Cape Breton Island in Canada. I know, they’re not as glamorous as a dinosaur fossil. But they’re 320 million years old, and you can see the plant perfectly. What was the world like then? Here’s a scene that I did showing a coal swamp from that time. I did it with tons of help from a fossil plants researcher at the Natural History Museum in Washington. This brings us to the first of our invisible worlds. I’m going to call it Invisible world number 1. It’s invisible because it doesn’t exist anymore — you can’t go take a photo of it. This is my favorite area and the one I’ve worked in the most. Here are some strange underwater creatures from close to that coal swamp that we just saw. And here’s a big scary fish called Dunkleosteus which lived a little earlier, in the Devonian period. The other day in a toy store I saw this version, I just had to get it. Some scientific illustrator who was good at 3D must have been asked to create this model. Okay, I know you’re waiting for the dinosaurs… here’s a scene by one of my favorite paleo artists, Douglas Henderson. I like that he creates a lot of atmosphere, and pays attention to the plants, and that his creatures are not constantly attacking one another. Though I did go for a bit of gore in this picture of the early dinosaur Herrerasaurus. I had to guess what color Herrerasarus might have been. We just don’t know. Maybe it even had some fuzzy proto-feathers? There was a huge revolution in dinosaur art when some amazing fossils in China showed that many of them had feathers. I love this particular image of nice woolly Yutyrannus. A little aside here to say that I think that there’s certainly a place for humor in science, and for one of my books I had to reconstruct a very early mammal called Morganucodon, or Morgie for short. And I did a cartoon about it called Artistic License. And I say, I normally consult with my subject. Is this what your fur was like, Morgie? Brrr! More hair! Like so? Yes yes, keep going. Waaaaait a minute! Another area of reconstruction is our human lineage. Here are three stages of a sculpture by paleo artist John Gurche. He spent many hours dissecting heads of apes and humans in order to be able to predict the exact thickness of the soft tissue. This one is a female Homo erectus. This deep knowledge of anatomy takes us to our next area, which is medical illustration. It’s invisible because it’s under the skin, and besides, it’s so complex — well, so messy, really — that illustrations explain it much better than photos can. I can do something simple like this, for the school dictionary, but I’m not a medical illustrator. In order to become a medical illustrator, you need to study lots of anatomy and physiology in order to do pictures like this one of the neck and mouth in cross-section. There’s another area that’s invisible: stuff that’s too small to see with the naked eye. Our third invisible world is the microscopic realm. Microscopes were invented in the second half of the 17th century, and a Dutch fellow by the name of van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to see cells and microbes. Here’s the drawing he did of sperm. Here are details of tiny shrimp larvae for a scientific paper. I wanted to mention here that in this case there’s not much artistic wiggle room, every single hair has to be perfectly visible. How we approach an illustration depends on who our audience is. Is it for scientists, or is it for the general public? Zooming in to the cellular level, here’s a drawing I did of the process of endosymbiosis, where certain bacteria became parts of more complex cells. When we get to the absolute limits of what today’s microscopes can detect, we can see molecules like this one, which is amazing. But even though we know that atoms are not shiny little balls, it’s easier to understand this way, isn’t it. In the case of genes there are these amazing animations by Drew Berry. Here’s a few seconds showing how genes are replicated. You’ve got a link in the comments. At the other end of the spectrum, when Galileo invented the telescope at the beginning of the 17th century, suddenly distant objects became visible. This is our invisible world number four: the cosmos. Galileo himself did these beautiful drawings of the moon. But what about worlds that are many light years away? The artist has to work with the astronomers and add his or her imagination in order to create scenes like this one, which is a view from the surface of planet Proxima Centauri b. Or this illustration of a Black hole, with lots of information. This makes me think about the challenges of illustrating abstract concepts and processes… things like gravity…. or photosynthesis. This is not a scientific area in and of itself, and it’s not exactly an invisible world, but you certainly can’t take photos of it! It applies to all the previous areas, and it helps to clarify all kinds of scientific knowledge. Here’s gravity… and photosynthesis… Another kind of process is time: timelines help us visualize it. In this one showing the evolution of life, kids get to play it with dice and see who’s the winner. I’ve also done many family trees, showing relationships, like this one for Planet Tuna that shows how we mammals are related to tuna. And finally, there’s infographics, which bring together a whole bunch of information in a way that’s easy to grasp. This one is by Flavia Gargiulo, my fellow illustrator at Planet Tuna. Flavia has really good design skills as well as illustration skills. So she’s able to take a tremendous amount of information from the researchers and put it together in a way that really works visually. And to wrap it all up, here is our finished mindmap. It’s not really a scientific illustration, but it is one more way of organizing information. OK, so now you have a sense of what scientific illustration is. And if you’re curious to know what it takes to get into the field, remember that there’s a second video where I tell you all about it. Thanks for watching and hope to see you again soon!

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